It seems impossible to find bad parts in such a thrilling British GP, but somehow, I’ve managed to find 4 issues that I – and probably many others – had with the race.
We can’t speak about this years British Grand Prix without touching on the incident at turn 3. Yes, that’s right. Kimi Raikonnen playing the part of the perfect number two driver to Sebastian… I joke of course. The reason this is a low point in the race may surprise some. It’s not because I’m a Lewis fanboy who wanted him to become the most successful driver at Silverstone. I hated this moment as it blew any chance of there being a Hamilton-Vettel on-track battle. In fact, as the Ferrari driver was in front into turn 3, we would have had a determined and motivated Lewis going for the win in front of him home crowd. Instead, we had to watch a series of overly easy overtakes revealing just how much better the top two teams are compared to the rest of the pack.
That brings us onto my next point. The difference in pace from the Mercs and Ferraris to the rest of the field is depressing. I know F1 has always had the faster teams and the rest however, this race it looked like the Grand Prix equivalent of LMP1 and LMP2 with Red Bull being this year’s non-hybrid P1 cars… Neither here nor there.
The third problem I had with the race was the tardiness of the Safety Car deployment for both accidents at the end of the race. Now for the Sainz-Grosjean incident, it wasn’t quite as bad as the cars were all bunched together at that point and the race director had time to make the right decision. However, for the massive crash at turn 1 where Ericsson tried keeping his DRS open through the corner leaving him with no rear end grip and ending off spinning and hitting the wall. Some sort of safety measure should have been scrambled immediately be it a SC or VSC as the marshals were running onto the scene while the track was still green. I may sound somewhat boring now, but this is extremely important. The incident happened right in the firing line of one of the fastest corners on the track and the cars were still going at full chat despite the yellow flags being waved.
Speaking of turn 1, it was different this year… Yes, this was the first time we had the DRS potentially being used through the flat-out corner. This was designed to work in the same way the third DRS zone worked in Austria. There wasn’t ever meant to be an overtake opportunity on that particular straight, it was meant to keep the cars close together and compensate for the dirty air. Even though we were told and understood this, the internet was rife with theories of crashing, overtaking and all-round carnage. I’m sure many of us got wrapped into the hype and when it didn’t happen as hoped, it was somewhat disappointing.
All in all, it was a fantastic race full of overtaking, tension and passion. We really are being spoiled with the recent races and I hope we don’t get too cross when they inevitably get slightly duller again. So finally, I’d like to say “Zipdupidoo, Grazzie Regazzi” to the best fans in the world…
We can’t speak about this years British Grand Prix without touching on the incident at turn 3. Yes, that’s right. Kimi Raikonnen playing the part of the perfect number two driver to Sebastian… I joke of course. The reason this is a low point in the race may surprise some. It’s not because I’m a Lewis fanboy who wanted him to become the most successful driver at Silverstone. I hated this moment as it blew any chance of there being a Hamilton-Vettel on-track battle. In fact, as the Ferrari driver was in front into turn 3, we would have had a determined and motivated Lewis going for the win in front of him home crowd. Instead, we had to watch a series of overly easy overtakes revealing just how much better the top two teams are compared to the rest of the pack.
That brings us onto my next point. The difference in pace from the Mercs and Ferraris to the rest of the field is depressing. I know F1 has always had the faster teams and the rest however, this race it looked like the Grand Prix equivalent of LMP1 and LMP2 with Red Bull being this year’s non-hybrid P1 cars… Neither here nor there.
The third problem I had with the race was the tardiness of the Safety Car deployment for both accidents at the end of the race. Now for the Sainz-Grosjean incident, it wasn’t quite as bad as the cars were all bunched together at that point and the race director had time to make the right decision. However, for the massive crash at turn 1 where Ericsson tried keeping his DRS open through the corner leaving him with no rear end grip and ending off spinning and hitting the wall. Some sort of safety measure should have been scrambled immediately be it a SC or VSC as the marshals were running onto the scene while the track was still green. I may sound somewhat boring now, but this is extremely important. The incident happened right in the firing line of one of the fastest corners on the track and the cars were still going at full chat despite the yellow flags being waved.
Speaking of turn 1, it was different this year… Yes, this was the first time we had the DRS potentially being used through the flat-out corner. This was designed to work in the same way the third DRS zone worked in Austria. There wasn’t ever meant to be an overtake opportunity on that particular straight, it was meant to keep the cars close together and compensate for the dirty air. Even though we were told and understood this, the internet was rife with theories of crashing, overtaking and all-round carnage. I’m sure many of us got wrapped into the hype and when it didn’t happen as hoped, it was somewhat disappointing.
All in all, it was a fantastic race full of overtaking, tension and passion. We really are being spoiled with the recent races and I hope we don’t get too cross when they inevitably get slightly duller again. So finally, I’d like to say “Zipdupidoo, Grazzie Regazzi” to the best fans in the world…
